Transcript
Mark (the fisherman) (0:00)
So we was going down the river there. There's a little.
Wes Ferguson (0:04)
When you saw it, did you think, well, that looks like a body?
Carol Dawson (0:08)
Hi, I'm Carol Dawson.
Wes Ferguson (0:11)
And I'm Wes Ferguson.
Carol Dawson (0:12)
And we are here to bring you another bonus episode of The Unforgotten Season 1, the Labor Day Ghost. The story above and around the murder of Shelly Watkins in my hometown of Corsicana, Texas.
Wes Ferguson (0:28)
This is the boy who found Shelley.
Carol Dawson (0:35)
Wow. The title of this is extremely poignant to me because as our listeners will be hearing in the course of this conversation, the three fishermen who actually found Shelly Watkins body in the Trinity river were very, very young.
Wes Ferguson (0:56)
Yeah. We recently learned that they were all teenagers or in their early 20s. And when I joined this project, I knew that we would do anything we could to find the fishermen who discovered Shelley's body in the Trinity river that day over 30 years ago. But their names had never been mentioned in any of the newspaper articles. The people that we knew and that we had reached out to didn't know their names. You know, we spoke to the 911 dispatcher who took that call, and she didn't know either. But we did find in the case files a sheet of paper that had a long list of potential witnesses that might have been called up to testify in the case. That was something the prosecutors were legally required to provide to the defense attorneys for Shelley's husband, Jerry Mack Watkins. But it was just a list of names, no identifying details or anything. But we figured that three of those names were probably those fishermen. And so you and I just went down the list trying to find every single person and reaching out to them. And by doing that, we did find a lot of other interesting people that had connections to this case, but we didn't find those fishermen. And I was wondering if you could talk about why that matters, like why go to so much trouble to find these fishermen who found Shelley?
Carol Dawson (2:22)
Well, absolutely. One of the things that has intrigued me for the past 28 or 29 years now, since I have spent that amount of my life focusing on this case and being haunted by it, was the fact that I knew three fishermen had found a. I always pictured them as maybe three middle aged guys who had gotten through with work for the day and had then met up to go for a little fishing excursion. And I had always wondered who they were because their official names were locked in the ongoing investigation report that was in the possession of the sheriff of Henderson County. And of course, they. There was no way that they were going to disclose any of those records or reports. To you and me. So when I first saw that long list of names the prosecutors provided as state witnesses in the case file, we're Talking more than 75 names, I literally started going through it one by one, because anybody who came across Shelley in that terrible condition was never going to forget, was going to mark their lives forever. And it was not only a profound discovery, but it was a very meaningful discovery in other ways, because they were the ones who undid whatever the murderer had tried to do, and that was to erase Shelley's presence and identity from the surface world forever. So it was a really big deal to try to find those three fishermen and have them, if they would speak with us, recount their experience to us, because we also knew that they could provide details about that discovery, that the other people we have interviewed who came upon the scene later, like quite a bit of time later in the day, after the three young fishermen had found her, they were going to have a very different point of view and a different experience. But for those first three fishermen, one of the essential points that really, really struck me was exactly where in the river they might have found her. And you and I can talk about that later in this episode because it is such a crucial point. But the thought of these three guys, whatever their ages were, whoever they were, coming across this woman's body has reminded me a lot of the fate of Ophelia in Hamlet. Ophelia, who, of course, was the young woman who drowns Hamlet's former girlfriend, and she winds up drowned and is found in a stream. And more and more, I have been thinking about Ophelia both as you and I, Wes, have worked on this podcast, and because of the book that I'm writing about this story, because of this long hair that the fishermen encountered when they first found the body. That image has just stuck with me so strongly. And yet it was an image that was not particularly well described in any of the newspaper articles or. Or the testimonies that we encountered. It was unique to these three fishermen. I do want to add that going through that long list of state's witnesses involved trying to identify a number of people I didn't know, as well as recognize the names of a number of people I did know, stretching from way back all the way into my childhood. For instance, the name Roy French, who. That was the name of a guy who owned a service station on Second Avenue in Corsicana. And so to cull through all of those names to try to figure out the ones most likely to be the fishermen was quite an interesting task. For me. And of course, you came at it from much more of an outsider's point of view. So you and I really had to collaborate on that. But you were the one who found him.